This posts comes from Search Engine Watch and was written by Chris Boggs.
SEO involves getting lots of moving pieces coming together in the right way to form a perfect storm of sorts, which equates to better search results for a Web site. Beyond SEO best practices, I polled our SEO team to come up with the top five “non-SEO” tasks that can help support the SEO process and get Web sites consistently ranked for relevant desired terms within the results.
1. Enhance Web Site Usability
Dr. Jakob Nielsen is considered to be a foremost authority of Web site usability factors, and he also has a knack for SEO. In his book “Designing Web Usability” (which many consider to be the “Bible” of usability), he writes that “site design must be aimed with simplicity above all else, with as few distractions as possible and with very clear information architecture and matching navigation tools.” From an SEO perspective, this is preaching to the choir. If sites aren’t human-friendly, they are usually even more unfriendly to search engine spiders.
Typically, enhancing usability also involves improving the information architecture of a site, which of course will help the site to be more easily spidered, and will often increase the potential for solid anchor text-rich internal linking. As SEW Expert Carrie Hill said last year: SEO and Usability: Use ‘em or Lose ‘em. Click here to read the four remaining tips.
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